Mystery vs. History in France

...This summer some 70,000 people clambered up the 3,000-foot pinnacle to the ruins...

...is), kinsmen of the Rosicrucians, adepts in occult geometry, or a mishmash of all of these...

...In her books and lectures, this lively historian anchors Catharism in the Christian fears and spiritual ferment that marked the first millennium...

...If only people were interested in the real Cathars," says Anne Brenon, director of the Centre National d'Etudes Cathares...

...As to the lavish decoration, Bedu is convinced it was intended to gratify the bishop, who came to bless the church, and notes that it resembles the adornment in other French churches...

...Until Lincoln stumbled upon it, the location was a secret??somehow linked to that of Jesus' dynasty??among the "initiated": Visigoths, Templars, Rosicrucians, Cathars (inevitably), and the 17th-century painter Nicolas Poussin...

...Lincoln's nonsense has been matched by others in the esoteric trade...

...But the sunworshipping myth continues to attract visitors??to the archaeologists' despair...

...Requests and payments flowed in from all over France...

...The artist is dragged in because one of his works, The Shepherds of Arcadia, says Lincoln, is organized around a pentagon, an "evident" clue to the "pentagon of mountains...

...he had originally intended to donate it to the Catholic Church as a home for retired priests...

...The answer, apparently, is that the priest advertised in the press, offering to conduct memorial services for bereaved families...

...The soul was reborn until untainted enough to attain heaven...

...It also presented the Cathars as "pure" sunworshipping Celts and anti-Semites, whereas in reality they befriended and protected Jews as fellow victims of the Inquisition...

...A peasant might have been a prince, and vice versa...

...Tens of thousands of visitors of all nationalities and ages have followed over the past two months...

...The enterprise distresses other villagers who are fed up with tourists traipsing through their farms, fields, streets, church, and cemetery...

...She and others concerned about the phenomenon of Montsegur and Rennes-le-Chateau consider it part of a much wider question: Are people sufficiently educated to separate fact from fiction in the daily barrage of information aimed at them...

...The ruins here have long been thought to be their last stronghold, finally overwhelmed after a prolonged siege in 1244...

...Fascinated by the Cathars, Heinrich Himmler commissioned a book on them...

...For example, hefindsinthename"Rennes" a far-fetched deformation of araignee (spider), but a rival author prefers the closer renne (reindeer) and proceeds to point to are indeer's head where Lincoln sees his pentacle...

...Indeed, since Zoe Oldenbourg's classic Massacre at Montsegur (1959), research of the records and archaeology have greatly expanded knowledge of the Cathars...

...The Court ofLucifer(\9il) sought to establish that Montsegur was Monsalvatge, the castle of the Holy Grail in Wagner's Parsifal...

...Archaeologists, however, have determined that the original castel was destroyed in the battle, and that a military fort was erected in its place to assert the French King's authority...

...To jolt people into thinking for themselves, Brenon often opens her spirited lectures by recalling some pertinent Nazi distortions...

...To spite his superior, Sauniere left his house to a servant...

...An obsession with purity and salvation led the Cathars to reject the corrupt material world...

...They are kept by a village family that runs a museum in the priest's house, rejects all accusations of "commercialism" (while making some 15,000 visitors a year pay to see the place), and believes that the priest discovered a "secret" of major "spiritual importance...

...Possibly the best known of the Rennes-le-Chateau publicizers is Henry Lincoln, who churns out best-sellers and television documentaries that pose as history...

...Braving Lincoln's charge that only bigoted Catholics or blinkered historians could disagree with him, a young local scholar, Jean-Jacques Bedu, has attempted to determine how Berenger Sauniere put together his small fortune...

...Although he claims these were part of his "Temple," such huts are frequent on both sides of the Pyrenees...

...When I traveled to the village recently, an Englishwoman was giving tours of the church and explaining "its terribly complex symbolism...

...Believed to date back to prehistory, they were used??and built??until a few decades ago by shepherds, who relied on them for shelter, lamb folds and cheese pantries...

...Without abandoning his messianic outlook, he has moved on to cosmic considerations...

...Poussin's landscape resembles the countryside of Rennes, Lincoln argues, and includes an oak of a genus common in the area...

...And Poussin spent most of his life in Italy...

...There was no hell, no purgatory...

...As it happened, the bishop learned about his mail-order approach to religion and obliged him to resign...

...Brenon regards Bedu's demythifying efforts as complementary to her own...

...Though many esoteric books continue to rework material from the Court of Lucifer, today tourists would rightly be indignant if told that their fascination with Montsegur and Rennes-le-Chateau "proved" their Nazi sympathies...

...But geometric structures are widespread in art...

...In Montsegur, the main attraction is the supposed remnants of the Cathars, a heretical Christian sect that flourished throughout the Languedoc region during the 12th and 13th centuries...

...We owe a lot to the Inquisition's bureaucratic efficiency," says Brenon...

...Its "attraction" is a turn-of-the-century priest, Berenger Sauniere, who amassed enough money to restore his church and build himself a large house...

...Still, false syllogisms and legends are precisely what make downright dishonest tosh so popular, and so potentially dangerous...

...Another Englishwoman runs a "spiritual center" nearby, and links the site to constellations as well as the pyramids...

...Lincoln displays further ignorance of the region by getting worked up over its smattering of igloo-shaped huts...

...This "gigantic Temple," "visible only to the gods," waspurportedly "built" around 1500 BCE, using both solar alignments and the English mile...

...Last June a motley of pilgrims gathered in this southern French town, where the solstice sun sends its first rays through a slit in a crumbling ancient wall, and in the nearby hilltop village of Rennes-le-Chateau, where it rises behind a toothlike crag...

...Iconology was blasphemous, feudal and religious hierarchy meaningless...

...Moreover, Erwin Panofsky specifically showed in Meaning in the Visual Arts that Renaissance thinkers brought together various Hellenistic, Oriental and medieval "cosmological interpretations of the theory of proportions," and that these played a role in painting into the 17th and 18th centuries...

...His latest work places the village at the heart of a "pentacle of mountains," yet superimposes onto them the pattern of a Star of David...

...hence a royal and papal persecution so ruthless that by the 15th century the heretics were extinct...

...The largest foreign contingent is British...

...That has been sufficient to spawn conspiracy theories and draw visitors??about 30,000 this year...

...Many are gullible, and so are easy targets for the esoteric trade that has grown up around these sights...

...In his early books he maintained that the Abbe Sauniere "discovered" Jesus had married Mary Magdalen and founded a dynasty, one of whose direct descendants (unnamed) would be the king and the "saviour" of Europe...

...Similar myths have developed around Rennes-le-Chateau, also located in "Cathar country," though it played no significant role in their history...

...The main footpath has been worn smooth in places, and the shortcuts taken endanger the remains of old walls...

...The fact that the outer walls stand in alignment with the sun is taken as proof that the Cathars were sunworshippers...

...This weakens the claim that it was designed by the priest and imbued with "occult" symbolism to provide posterity with clues to a "secret...

...The Cathars survive by way of a few religious texts and from the voluminous records of the Inquisition...

...For what little is left of the Cathar site is increasingly threatened by tourism...

...The word "secret" does appear in the priest's papers, but Bedu contends that in context it is merely shorthand for "secretary"??probably the local bishop's, whom Sauniere had informed about the discovery of an ancient vault beneath the church...

...Had Sauniere lived in our time he would have been praised for his entrepreneurial flair...

...Bedu bases his account on Sauniere's meticulous diaries and notebooks...

...Yet history appeals less than mystery, to judge from a wide range of best-selling yarns .These variously claim the Cathars to have been descendants of the Druids and Templars, keepers of the Holy Grail and Solomon's Treasure (whatever that Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...In fact, the rocks, hills and trees there are typical of the northern Mediterranean, too...

...The social implications of all this were downright revolutionary...